


Echoes Of The Buried

by Seta_Kaita



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst and Humor, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 16:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9332606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seta_Kaita/pseuds/Seta_Kaita
Summary: Leonard McCoy was in the habit of burying things.Five burdens Bones buried throughout his life, but dug out again.One that he left where he'd buried it.Not as dark as it sounds.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hinawari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinawari/gifts).



> This fic was inspired by the song Moondust by Jaymes Young and in particular this McKirk fanvid:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdMkurl9b-8
> 
> Thanks to my beta Hinawari! May the tribbles be with you.

Leonard McCoy was in the habit of burying things. He had done so for most of his life.  
His father had been a wise and capable mentor to him for every challenge life had thrown his way. And this particular coping strategy Leonard had learned from him.

\---***---

1

At the tender age of six, Leonard’s father had found him in the backyard after he had come home from his shift at the hospital and Leonard had failed to comply with his mother’s request for his presence at the dinner table. Leonard had been raised to be a polite boy with good manners and his father had known him well enough to figure something must have been seriously wrong then, because he wouldn’t simply not turn up when his mother called for him.

His father had found him in the shade of an old tree, one that his great-grandfather had supposedly planted there himself. Leonard had never met the man, but he felt a strong sense of family values whenever he sat by it. It offered comfort and stability to him and he was in dire need of it at that time.

Bruised and beaten his face looked like he had scrubbed it along a stone wall and his knuckles were in no better shape. The tender flesh beneath the broken skin burned in the open air like three dozen ants had sprayed their acid all over him and his eyes stung from the tears he was holding back.

“What is it?” His father had asked as he was lowering himself on a big, knobby root next to Leonard. He radiated patience and understanding; Leonard never refused to tell his father anything.

“At school… They laughed at me today.” Leonard started, his voice high-pitched and shaky as he fought with his tears. The raw skin hurt just as much as the humiliation did. “We had a substitute teacher today and he did a role call. He called me by my full name.” He choked out the words before his tears finally spilled and a sob replaced the rest of what he wanted to say. He wanted to tell his father all the nasty things they had said about his name, how “Horatio” was an old man’s name, how his grandfather, from whom he had inherited it, must have been a dimwit, because his name was so stupid. But none of that made it past his lips as his sobs shook his frame and his father drew him into his arms.

When Leonard had calmed down a little, he smiled sadly at his son and said the words Leonard would make an essential part of his person:

“If something bothers me so much that I can’t look past it, I bury it, so it cannot drag me down along with it.”

That night, after dinner, Leonard, his mom and his dad had taken a little box with a piece of paper on which Leonard had written his second name to the old tree. Together, they dug a hole and buried Leonard’s name. He felt much lighter afterwards.

\---***---

Years later, when he had grown up and moved past the burden his name had once posed to him, he went back to his name’s grave and dug the box out again. From then on, he always signed his name Leonard H. McCoy.

\---***---

2

Ironically, the next big burden he buried was the death of his father. The man who had influenced his life in so many ways and should have done so for decades more now lay beneath six feet of hard, dry soil, rotting away until nothing physical remained of him.

And Leonard ached from it, worse than he could have ever imagined in his darkest dreams. 

Heartache so strong it became physical pain whenever he thought of his father, overwhelming him every morning when he woke up and remembered why his chest felt so hollow. He had never understood the sheer unfairness of cancer so comprehensively as he did now.

His broken heart dragged Leonard down into a deep, dark pit filled with booze, nightmares and cold glares from his wife.

It took him months to learn to live with the pain. Nearly a year until the moment he looked into a bottle of whiskey and decided he was done with this shit. Never let it be said that no one has ever found the answer at the bottom of a bottle.

Just like the first time, Leonard took his mother out in their yard to bury the proof if his failure under the old tree. It was time to take his life back.

\---***---

After the first patient Leonard hadn’t been able to save after his father’s death, he went back into the yard and for the second time in his life unburied his burden.

The empty, dirt-stained bottle on a shelf in every office he had from then on became a reminder for him. He wanted to be a doctor who intimately knew what it meant to fight a battle you couldn’t win and still stand tall after losing it. He wanted to remember what it felt like so that he knew what he was fighting for. That it was worth it.

And that no life he lost would ever be buried and forgotten.

\---***---

3

And just like that, life kicked him in the ass all over again.

Having taken up his work at the hospital again, Leonard had poured his single-minded determination into his duties and completely missed the signs. Until Jocelyn handed him the papers and a pen.

It had taken months for the divorce to be finalized and Jocelyn had kicked him out straight away. Seeking comfort in his old friend, the whiskey bottle, Leonard had idly stood by and waited to wake up from this nightmare. He had barely managed to fight off his demons after his father’s death and now his soon-to-be ex-wife had made it her personal goal to make his life living hell with all the claims her lawyer made. And apparently a hung-over doctor didn’t impress the judge much, either.

Driven from town he had packed his bags, kissed his mother goodbye and left for Iowa, where a good friend from med-school had taken him in for a few months.

There, he had met Christopher Pike on his scout for new cadets. He might have been scared of space and flying, but what really horrified him was the prospect of ruining his life completely if things stayed the way they were. Maybe, what Leonard needed right then was the biggest scare of his life to open his eyes and see the world again.

He signed the papers, celebrated a little with Pike and then asked him to attend a personal funeral with him.

To his great satisfaction, he stuck his divorce papers in an envelope and buried them behind the bar. With a few drinks shared between the two of them, they found the whole thing entirely too hilarious.

\---***---

Later, when he officially enrolled and registered at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, he was asked to supply a copy of his divorce papers.

When he handed them in a week later, the admin arched an eyebrow at the dirt stains but wisely refrained from commenting.

\---***---

4

He had never failed to see the irony in taking up employment in Starfleet when he hated flying with an unparalleled passion and vengeance. Jim Kirk had a whole archive in his head of every rant Leonard had ever given about space. It was quite impressive, to be honest, and fairly entertaining when alcohol was involved. Then again, everything Jim said was entertaining. Especially when alcohol was involved. Leonard just made a point of pretending otherwise when he was sober since he wasn’t in the habit of stroking Jim’s ego if he could help it.

One thing Leonard was actually scared of, though, was space. The unimaginably endless void full of millions of different ways to die – and most of them incredibly simple – was just too much for his overly imaginative, yet pessimistic mind. From the vantage point of a doctor, space exploration was doomed to kill people off like flies in a jar.

On the other side of his fear stood James Tiberius Kirk.

Brilliant, ever-optimistic, enthusiastic and oh so magnetic his friend had a wicked way of drawing people towards him and Leonard had been caught in his orbit since “I may throw up on you”. Leonard had been true to his word half a dozen times since meeting the other man, but so had Jim.

Jim, who had talked him through flight procedures. Jim, who had blackmailed Leonard into taking flying lessons by hording photographs of Leonard’s secret stack of Jane Austen novels. Jim, who had grinned brighter than the sun when Leonard had taken him on a ride to Georgia in a chartered shuttle on Leonard’s first flight after getting his license.

And since Leonard had long since decided to follow Jim to the stars, his fears be damned, he had taken his father’s advice to heart once again and buried the shoes he had worn on the day of the first shuttle ride to Starfleet as a symbol of his reluctance to leave solid ground next to the old tree in his mother’s backyard while Jim helped her with dinner.

\---***---

After the horrible run-in with Nero and then Khan, Jim’s stunts in space were enough to prove to Leonard that maybe a little fear of space was just healthy and he dug what remained of the shoes out again.

\---***---

5

Jim had survived his little adventure with the warp-core. Well, survived was one way to put it; others would probably say Jim had died and Leonard had played God and raised him from the dead like a zombie. They _would_ say that if anyone but Leonard and a few choice Starfleet officers had known about it. Officially, Jim had survived because Khan’s blood had regenerated his irradiated cells before he could die.

But that didn’t change the fact that Leonard felt like he had broken his oath and was now more Dr. Frankenstein than Paracelsus. So in the aftermath of Khan’s attack, they buried the dead, healed the living as best they could, rebuilt the city and repaired the Enterprise while Leonard tried to overcome his guilt. Over time, it became nearly insufferable and he found solace again in drink.

Jim found him one night in his quarters.

“What are you drinking for?” Jim asked while he poured himself a glass and topped up Leonard’s.

“Guilt of the immoral.” Jim clinked his glass against Leonard’s in a toast. He didn’t even need to elaborate. When Jim emptied his glass in three big gulps, Leonard found he wasn’t the only one trying to run from his ghosts. “And you?”

“Survivor’s guilt.” Leonard nodded. Of course Jim would take the lost souls upon his shoulders.

“I’ll bury mine if you bury yours.” He suggested to his best friend and Jim graced him with a small smile.

“Deal.”

\---***---

The next morning, Leonard woke up with a head that seemed twice the normal size and the distinct feeling that he had somehow buried his medical license in a fit of drunken stupidity. He jabbed a hypo into his neck, then into Jim’s as he found him asleep on his couch and rummaged through his drawer where he kept all his important documents.

When he found his license missing, he hit his head against a wall with a groan and grabbed his clothes to go dig in the yard.

\---***---

+1

This time, Leonard decided, he meant it. He was absolutely, 100% sure that this thing would weigh him down over the next five years in unchartered space until he no longer possessed the strength to get out of bed in the morning. Because he had been here before and he had seen what this thing had done to his mother after his father’s death.

Never in his life did Leonard want to be crushed by love.

And this love was huge, tremendous, _colossal_! If it had had physical form, it would have easily eclipsed the sun from outer space. Every fiber of Leonard’s being tingled when Jim smiled at him and Leonard knew infatuation when he saw and felt it. This thing wasn’t healthy and it was too much for one person to hold. If he didn’t bury it, it would crush him. And many people could easily become collateral damage in its wake.

So this time, he would do it right. He didn’t want to bury his love on earth and come home to it after five years and do anything stupid like dig it up again.

This time, he made the choice to bury his love in the moon dust.

Getting a shuttle to the moon wasn’t as hard as keeping it a secret from his friends, but Leonard managed and thus found himself standing in a space suit on the face of the moon, a tiny glass casket under his arm that contained the symbol of his repressed hopes that Jim might return his feelings: the again-dead tribble that had saved Jim’s life months ago.

He had requested for the shuttle to land about a mile south of the original landing site from 1969 and like a lost astronaut he walk-jumped a few yards further in the low gravity for some semblance of privacy. When he found a suitable spot, he bend down and dug a shallow grave into the moon dust. He wasn’t even sure if the dust was heavy enough to keep the tribble buried, but he didn’t plan on sticking around to find out after it was buried. The tribble could just as well float in the atmosphere, as long as it was as far away from Leonard as he could put it.

Just as he was shoveling dust over the lifeless body – which wasn’t nearly as simply as it sounded, with the tribble being near-weightless in the thin atmosphere – a hand landed on his arm and Leonard jumped at least three feet high in shock; the hand on his arm kept him from drifting away in the low gravity. When he looked around, he could just barely make out Jim’s face behind the visor of his helmet.

“Dammit, Jim! You scared me to death!” He exclaimed, ignoring the various shades of irony.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry and all that, yada yada, but what the hell do you think you’re doing on the moon, burying a tribble?” Jim demanded to know, pointing at the covered alien in emphasis.

Leonard had known the man for many years now, had lived and studied and fought alongside him, cherished and loved him. And he was fully aware that Jim would stubbornly ask until the day Leonard died if he didn’t get an answer. He couldn’t even blame his friend. Leonard wasn’t exactly known for taking random shuttles into space on a semblance of secrecy.

“How did you even find me?” He stalled nevertheless, trying to come up with a suitable explanation that wasn’t a version of “I love your stupid ass”.

“When one Dr. Leonard H. McCoy charters a private shuttle to the moon and then tries to hide it, I think you might as well have painted it on the face of the moon. No pun intended.” Jim shot back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Now spill.”

So Leonard did. There was no way around it, anyway. He might even have used a slightly nicer version than what had been going through his head, less “I’m unhealthily, incurably and illogically head-over-heels for you, you crazy, suicidal maniac” and more “You are my heart and soul and I can’t live without your love, so I buried my heart on the fucking moon”. Jim stared at him for a few heartbeats that were the only sound out here in the vast void.

“Lemme get this straight: You flew to the moon, which is – as I may add – in _outer space_ , of which you are scared, to bury the dead tribble that saved my life so that you can forget how much you are unhappily in love with me because you think I would never love you back?” Jim wondered aloud and Leonard somehow had the feeling that there were a few very carefully chosen expletives and insults about to be thrown at his head.

“In a nutshell.” At least Leonard felt like they could move past this. Jim didn’t seem more than artificially pissed.

“Alright, get your ass back on board so I can take you back to Earth and then to bed and after we’re done fucking our stupid brains out, let’s talk about how much I love you, too.” Jim said matter-of-factly, but there was an undeniable undertone of fondness in his voice. “And leave the tribble here. From now on I wanna look up to the moon and see the proof of your love in the sky.”

\---***---

When he was back on Earth after the five-year mission, Leonard looked up to the night sky and smiled fondly. His love for Jim really was big enough to reach from here to the moon.

\---***---

Dr. Leonard Horatio McCoy might have been in the habit of burying things, but he wasn’t above digging them up again when necessary.


End file.
